Monday, December 14, 2015

This is a quick guide on how to install PHP 7 in Ubuntu and have it work with Observium to greatly speed things up. Note that this will only be useful if you have a very large Observium-installation and start to notice the web interface slowing down.

PHP 7.0.0 released a couple of weeks ago and promised up to double the performance of PHP 5.
As I run a very large Observium installation with over 1100 devices that are being monitored I had a very slow web interface as a result of that. When I heard about the big performance improvements in PHP7 I decided to try it out.

The result was even better than I expected! Most of the pages in the web UI needed about 5s to render and some even needed over 7s with PHP5. After switching to PHP7 my UI now loads most pages in less than 1.5s and the most heavy pages renders in about 2s.
PHP7 proved to perform 2 to 3 times as fast as PHP5!

Install Observium with PHP 7

To install Observium with PHP7 you need to change a few step from the install guide.

Note that this only works for Observium Pro for now, Observium CE wont work with PHP7 yet!

This is based on the Ubuntu 14-guide and assumes you have a freshly installed Ubuntu 14.

About

The Best Practice Blog is maintained by Markus Klock, a Cisco-certified computer networks consultant and Svante Boberg, a Senior server operations engineer.Here we write about computer networks, virtualization, security and other tech suff.